COLOURED PEOPLE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 95, 13 July 1927, Page 12

COLOURED PEOPLE

You may see the original of Uncle Tom’s Cabin any day in the West Indies —pewter-grey wooden huts in which an astonishing number of children grow up with their dusky parents. There is no chimney to the primitive house, for the mother and older girls do all the cooking outside in the cool of the evening. At night the door and the window shutters are closed tightly, to keep out the “jumbies” and ghosts. To the negro child’s imagination these abound, and, without his imagination, he knows the danger which can enter with the ten-inch-long centipedes, the numerous snakes, vampire bats, and other terrors of the tropic night. When “moving day” comes, the four walls and the roof of a negro home are easily taken down and loaded on to a cart. The boys shoulder various things, including the front door and doorstep; the girls bring along the few pots and pans and window shutters; mother brings the babies, and father superintends generally. Thus a happy negro family takes its own house, as well as its household, wherever it goes. Then the little establishment is set up in the most favourable unoccupied spot to be found. A pleasant green of bananas and corn, a little patch of the always agreeable sugar-cane, and perhaps a paw-paw, or bread-fruit tree, to shade the establishment, will soon make a suitable resting-place, until the need comes to move on again. A pig or goat tethered to the corner of the house, a few fowls, and many half-clad children complete the domestic happiness of the simple household. The irresponsible good nature of the coloured folk is one of their best redeeming features. You see smiles on their faces whenever there is a reasonable excuse to laugh; and whether it is the plump market woman riding to the Rialto on a tiny donkey, or a little family group sitting by the roadside making the inevitable lunch off sugarcane, the same good nature usually prevails, as an example to the rest of the world to show a smile and not a tear.

The coloured race dearly loves a little brief authority. On arriA'ing at a port like Kingston, in Jamaica, the swarms of boatmen appear to expend their energy more in ordering each other about than in real Avork, but they will generally only obey a Avhite man. A negro overseer is usually a failure, and negroes will take punishment only from a pale-face. If a negro teacher dares to punish a col-

oured child at school, an irate mother soon appears and settles matters in no uncertain way; but the mother is made happy, probably, if her child is cuffed by a white mistress. One negro nfother tried to enlist the services of a negro girl—as black as coal —to take care of her baby, while the mother acted as nurse for a white lady. But the ebony-coloured girl answered: “I’se no ’tend no nigger babies’ ” The smartly-clad negro policeman may lead away a minor sinner of his own race, but the victim refuses to take his sentence willingly from any other than a white hand. Fireflies in the West Indies are so large and brilliant that girls and women wear them as ornaments in the hair at night, or imprison them in tiny cages of gold wire hanging as bangles from their bracelets. This living jewellery makes a most effective ornamentation, as the pretty creatures open and fold their glowing wings in the dusk of a tropic night. In Cuba the milk-boy does not bring

his rattling cans, but he comes driving around to your front door his little herd of cows, with perhaps a calf or two following behind them; he draws' from nature’s source the desired supply and passes it to you, as the climate in this and other West Indian islands is too hot for milk to be sold in the usual way. With the milking done before one’s very eyes, it seems impossible not to have the purest milk; but the Cuban milkman is as tricky as others are proverbially aaid to be. Sometimes you discover that there is water in your milk-jug after all, for the innocent-looking native haa had a bag of water secreted about hi* w*ist with a rubber tube running down the inside of his sleeve, the point hidden m the palm of his hand, and so by a gentle pressure against his side while milking he has been able to perform his little trick upon a customer who has not yet learned the nretty ways of the country! “Throw a lucky man into the Nile.” says an Arabian proverb, “and he will come up with a fish in his mouth’”